However, you can't simply appeal to authority. The medical community is often wrong.
Yes they are wrong with surprising frequency. That does not however mean that you cannot appeal to authority unless you have evidence that they authority is reasonably likely to be wrong. My wife is a doctor and has quite literally forgotten more about medicine than I will ever know. I would be an absolute fool to not take her opinions on any medical matter very seriously. Doesn't mean I have to turn my brain off or that she cannot be wrong but the vast majority of the time she understands the issues involved FAR better than I will. We trust doctors because by and large they have a very credible track record of actually getting it right more than anyone else. In the absence of other available data a trusted expert with a credible track record is a good source of information to listen to.
The pharmaceutical industry has sold some utter crap to people. It routinely does bad things in the name profit.
They also have produced miracle treatments that save lives and alleviate suffering. LOTS of them. Odds are very good that the big percentage of the people reading this are alive today because of the drugs produced by the pharmaceutical industry. They also are closely regulated to ensure that opportunities for quackery are minimized. Just because there have been some criminals in the industry doesn't make the entire industry guilty by association. Microsoft has sold a lot of crap software in the name of profit but we don't blame the entire software industry for their actions. Doing so for the pharma industry is an equally illogical application of guilt by association.
Of all Ms. McCarthy's flaws inherent distrust of the medical industry is not one of them in my opinion.
It is when there is a HUGE amount of evidence that vaccines are largely safe, effective, have few side effects and save lives. You don't have to trust the medical industry but if you don't trust the mountains of credible data available supporting the use of vaccines and other demonstrably effective drugs then you are an idiot. The data is available if you care to look into it. Miss McCarthy plainly has never bothered and her actions almost certainly have lead to preventable deaths and illnesses from confused parents who avoided vaccines for no good reason. What she has done is functionally equivalent to shouting fire in a crowded movie theater when there is no fire. I think her actions are borderline criminal.
I have no problem with a healthy skepticism of any claim no matter how well accepted. Test any and all hypothesis you can. That's how science is supposed to work. But (falsely) claiming authoritatively that there is a link between vaccines and autism when literally none of the evidence supports that claim is irresponsible in the extreme.
Is it because of her advanced medical degree? Her first hand knowledge of the pharmaceutical industry?
Because if you say ANYTHING, no matter how absurd, on television or any other public forum, someone is going to believe it. Doesn't matter if it is true or not. Doesn't matter if it is clearly a joke. Doesn't matter if you explicitly say that it isn't true. Doesn't matter if it is not supported by the evidence, or just clearly logically wrong to anyone with a functioning brain. Some non-zero percentage of the population will absolutely believe it if it is said out loud.
Many people who have to deal with autism are looking for a scapegoat. They want to believe there is a cause other than random chance roll of the genetic dice and that we know what that cause is even when we do not. They are unwilling to accept that the current answer is "we don't know". They want to believe that someone is to blame for their situation. Combine that with the fact that humans are REALLY good at pattern matching, to the point where we often find patterns where there aren't any. As a result they will grasp onto anything that resembles an explanation. They might blame chemicals or vaccines or "immoral" behavior, or comets, or government conspiracies or lack of prayer or violent video games or a minority group conspiracy or any number of other explanations that clearly don't work when examined against the available facts.
There are several logical fallacies at work here. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, confirmation bias, magical thinking, fallacy of the single cause, and probably some others I'm not thinking of.
Shockingly, this move has not led them to embrace any of the vaccines that have been reformulated by popular demand to reduce or eliminate whatever originally had them worried, nor has it led to any apparent interest in working with the toxicology people to determine what level of 'greenness'/'reduced toxins' is acceptable
That's because their objections to vaccines were never based in logic or evidence. Mostly its a combination of conspiracy theory and scientific illiteracy with a bit of confirmation bias and save-the-children thrown in the mix. The same people that would think vaccines cause autism despite there being huge amounts of evidence showing no link whatsoever are the same sort of people who are gullible enough to think homeopathy and other so-called "alternative medicine" is something other than quackery.
I assume her limited acting engagements got even smaller when film studios realized how badly most people didn't like her because of her anti-vaccine views, putting everyone at risk because she is a moron
Frankly most people aren't even aware of her views on vaccines and frankly the studios could not care less about such things for the most part. She gets hired for acting gigs largely on the strength of her physical appearance. Nobody is going to mistake her acting ability with that of Meryl Streep. As brutal as it is to say, an aging playmate/model has a short shelf life in Hollywood. It's hard for even very talented actresses to get work in their 40s. It's much harder when their ability to get acting gigs was based on their looks in the first place.
Yes, of course there will be low paying jobs as well. But we need high paying jobs to move the median up.
It's not as simple as just moving the median. If you move the median wage up then inflation will tend to erase most of the gains and in the short run will hurt the people below the median as well as those displaced by the actions taken to move the median. Inflation adjusted wages haven't actually moved that much in recent years for a big swath of the population. Inflation is not independent of incomes. Not to say you can't move everyone up in time but it's complicated.
Auto production gravitates to places with lowers costs, but the cheap labor conservatives are the ones pitting the states against each other
Again, you are assigning political intent where there (generally) is none. Capital does not care whether you are liberal or conservative. If you are running a business and you are trying to maximize profits then you have to keep costs low. That includes labor costs. None of this has anything to do with being conservative or liberal inherently.
Just look at the Tennessee story, where Volkswagen management wanted a unionized workforce, but the politicians said it would make them noncompetitive
Doesn't mean they are wrong. There was a LOT of BS arguments made by politicians (and others) in Tennessee but not all of it was BS. Unions demonstrably do tend to raise costs and companies will generally try to avoid unions if they have the option to do so as a result. Unions have a pretty bad PR problem at the moment, significantly of their own making. I have no problem at all with workers bargaining collectively but unions have done a terrible job justifying their existence. They need to find a way to show how they will do a better job AND keep costs under control while doing so.
Also, if you think you can get $20 an hour to work at GM, please put an application in, and let me know how that works out for you.
You absolutely CAN get $20/hour to work at GM if you are skilled labor. I live in Michigan and work in the auto industry and I can introduce you to literally hundreds of line workers who currently make more than $20/hour. New hires often make less but not all of them. Some jobs have a limited supply of talent and companies are forced to pay more as a result, GM included.
It's the TOTAL number of high-paying jobs that's important, and people tend to gravitate to what they like.
You seem to overlook the fact that if there are high paying jobs there must, by definition, be low paying jobs as well. Not everyone can have high paying jobs simultaneously anymore than everyone can have an above average IQ. In the long run economic growth can benefit everyone, rich and poor alike. In the short run however it is something close to a zero sum game. If you make one person wealthier you are making another poorer at least temporarily. If you have a larger pool of high paying jobs, in the short run you necessary are making the pot of money available to lower wages workers smaller.
You might be able to implement policies that benefit most/all people in the long run but there will be some short term pain in the process.
I could never imagine working nine to five on an auto assembly line, but that's what people did 50 years ago at GM, for $20 an hour before the cheap labor conservatives came along and crapped in the punch bowl.
People get paid that much TODAY to work on some lines at GM. $20/hour is roughly $40K/year. Not exactly a huge salary in the US these days. There are plenty of assembly workers that get paid well in excess of $20/hour.
Furthermore it isn't "cheap labor conservatives" that limit pay at the automakers. You could have had to most generous liberal management you could envision in charge of GM and Chrysler and they still would have gone bankrupt. What primarily limits direct labor pay is competition. Labor is a huge percentage of the cost of building vehicles. That means that production will gravitate towards locations with cheaper labor costs. Ford, GM and Chrysler in years past agreed to labor contracts that were simply not economically sustainable in the long run. When new competitors with lower labor costs entered the market, the Big Three were unable to adjust their cost structure to match. (Note, this isn't an anti-labor screed. Management shoulders a huge portion of the blame here) Labor costs had to come down and that ultimately meant some combination of lost jobs and lower pay rates. It was simply economic "physics" at work - a reversion to the mean.
Since when is fuel transfer costly or complicated?
It is HUGELY expensive to transport millions of gallons of jet fuel out into the middle of the ocean. A Nimitz class carrier can hold around 3 million gallons of jet fuel which sounds like a lot but it's enough to keep the planes flying for a few weeks of active operations. You seriously think 3 million gallons of jet fuel every few weeks is cheap?
Furthermore underway transfers are dangerous to both the ships involved and the personnel. Don't mistake a good safety record for an activity being safe.
Even if carriers did not need fuel, they would still require food resupply, equipment resupply, spare parts resupply, munitions resupply, crew swaps, etc. so carriers and other ships would still need to meet with supply ships every other week even if you take fuel out of the equation.
So your argument is that we should not take fuel out of the resupply equation if possible because we're going to have to resupply other stuff anyway? Peculiar argument you've got there...
Why would you make a resupply schedule any more costly and/or complicated than absolutely necessary?
At sea refueling is trivially easy, all you need is a ship that can carry a lot of fuel, a pump, and a hose.
"Trivially easy"? I think the Navy would disagree strongly with you on that. There are a huge number of non-trivial logistics issues. You have the expense of maintaining a second ship. You have to have that ship transport the fuel to an arbitrary location on the globe. You have to keep the fuel supply safe and ensure that the fuel tender isn't tracked back to the ship it is refueling. You have a ship with a large amount of potentially explosive fuel on board with all the attendant safety hazards that causes. It means your ships are limited in where they can go and how long by their fuel supplies rather than mission parameters.
The fact that they're fairly good at doing it doesn't mean it is something they find easy or useful. Cut of a military's fuel supply and they are effectively helpless. Fuel logistics are a HUGE and expensive problem for the military. It supposedly costs something like $16 to transport $1 worth of fuel. Also bear in mind that a lot of fuel comes from pretty volatile locations that we are likely to engage in hostile action with. There is a reason our military is putting a LOT of money into alternative fuel research. It's a huge cost and a huge tactical/strategic problem for them.
And realistically, when is a carrier or other ship likely to be far from supply lines?
Middle of the Pacific perhaps? Or any other ocean? Or when near hostiles? You don't really want to be refueling anywhere close to the people you are fighting if you can avoid it.
That's too bad, since the 2500 Cummins still had a manual available (the only one left in a full-size truck) the last time I checked.
Out of curiosity, why do you want a manual for a truck? Current automatic transmissions have 8-10 gears (the Ram 1500 has 8) and you certainly wouldn't want to row that many gears. I like manual transmissions too but only in cars like a BMW that are fun to drive. I like my truck fine but I wouldn't describe it as fun to drive.
Nissan is supposedly coming out with a diesel for their Titan pickup (heavy duty I think) in the next year or so. Might be worth investigating. If the Ram 1500 ecodiesel is a success (off to a good start) I'd be surprised if Ford and Chevy didn't follow suit.
Actually what I'd *really* like to see is a diesel-electric hybrid for trucks. Think about it. If you want gobs of torque there is nothing better than electric motors. That's why they use them on locomotives. For a truck it makes perfect sense to treat it like a small scale locomotive if you are hauling stuff. You'd be able to get better fuel economy AND better hauling power. I'm kind of surprised we haven't seen semis with that sort of powertrain yet. Would make a lot of sense I would think.
Diesel 3-series (which has been around for several years now actually)
Unfortunately the recent version is quite a bit less powerful than the 335d from a few years ago which got worse gas mileage but had over 400ft/lbs of torque. I'd happily buy a used 335d if I could find a used one for a decent price. I test drove one 3-4 years ago and it was awesome.
Ram Ecodiesel are pretty high on my list of vehicles to get sooner or later
Probably the truck I'll get to replace my Ridgeline. I can't believe it's taken so long to get that engine in a pickup. I'm more surprised it isn't available in a Jeep Wrangler.
I just hope they're available with a manual transmission...
Highly unlikely I think for the pickup. Very probable for the BMW though.
That's still absolute shit economy relative to its size, given that a VW Golf/Jetta TDI (which, being an American, is about the only Diesel I know to compare to) is only about 5 mpg lower.
There finally are now a few decent diesel options. A Jeep Grand Cherokee diesel with 420 ft/lbs of torque gets 30mpg highway. The 2014 BMW 3 series diesel gets 32city/45hwy MPG. The Ram 1500 ecodiesel gets about 28mpg highway and can tow 9000lbs. (same engine as the Grand Cherokee)
That is not the pain of XP EoL, it is the self inflicted torture by those who refuse to use free and open source software.
Refuse? Find me accounting software that is open source and functionally equivalent to even something as basic as Quickbooks or some 3D CAD software equivalent to Solidworks or photo editing equivalent to Photoshop. (I'll save you some time, they don't exist and GIMP is not a replacement for Photoshop) Open source is great and all but it doesn't solve every problem and there are some very important bits of software that quite simply do not have open source options available. Are you planning to write them?
Believe me, if I'm an accountant and if there was an open source version of something like Quickbooks out there that worked well, I'd be all over that like stink on a skunk. Unfortunately no such thing exists. Exactly how do you propose a business do their accounting without using proprietary software? Enlighten us.
Security is a process not a feature. And the security in XP is entirely adequate for my rather modest needs. Win 7 is unquestionably better but not enough that I care because the threat profile I face isn't going to be meaningfully improved by Windows 7. Security is like insurance. Nice to have but you can easily pay for more of it than you actually need.
Do you actually realize how fucking complicated Windows is under the hood? Millions of lines of code written in low level languages.
As a matter of fact I do realize that. I have a VERY clear understanding of what it requires. I also know that Microsoft already has the infrastructure in place to maintain it and I know that its affect on Microsoft's profitability is quite modest judging by their financial statements which I have read in some detail. If they cease support then they will never put humpty-dumpty back together again.
There are other reasons beyond "money grab" at play, but you clearly don't care to look at that anyway, so no use wasting my time there.
I disagree. Yes there are technical challenges but money is the bottom line here. Not even a question about that. Microsoft made a strategic decision which they believe will profit the company best in the long run. There is even a good chance they are right. However as a user of their products I am under no obligation to be supportive of Microsoft's decision as it adversely affects me. I run a company that uses mostly XP workstations and they work fine for our admittedly modest needs. I don't relish the prospect of spending thousands of dollars to replace machines that weren't broken in the first place.
Realistically the current 30 minutes for 180 miles range or 50 minutes for a full 300 mile range charge that Tesla offers is more than adequate for most people.
I think it is close but they probably need to cut the 30 minute time in half before people will be ok with it. 30 minutes is a pretty long time to stand around your car waiting for it to charge. It's fine if you are stopping for a long break but I don't really need to stop for a half hour or more every 3 hours of driving. My current car can go from Detroit to Cleveland and about halfway back on a single tank and if I need to stop it is a 5-10 minute deal. A Telsa could usually make the trip one way (barely) but if I needed to stop for fuel I'd add a half hour minimum to the trip. Not bad but not quite competitive yet either.
50 minutes for a full 300 mile range charge that Tesla offers
How close you'll get to the maximum claimed range depends on how you are driving and the weather. With sloppy cold weather and fast driving you might only see 200 miles of range. I spoke with a Tesla owner and he indicated that driving like crazy in cold sloppy weather with everything running (heater etc) you might see a range of around 180 miles on their biggest battery pack (which he had).
Electric vehicles will have match that capability at some point or they are going to be forever stuck in the niche of toys and glorified shopping carts.
They probably don't need to match the speed of refueling with gasoline but they need to get close. I figure something in the 10-20 minute range for around 200 miles of range is probably about where it will get competitive.
There is the option of having a towable generator for longer trips to extend range for long trips. Think of it as hybrid on demand. Not the most elegant of solutions but might be a useful stopgap measure while electric vehicle charging tech develops.
Very fast charge (on the order of 1-2 mins for current battery sizes) would make "gas stations" viable for electric cars.
I think the magic tipping point number is probably somewhere around 10-15 minutes. Maybe 20 at the outside. I doesn't have to be shorter than gasoline pumps but it needs to be relatively close in duration to get enough juice to go something like 200 miles or thereabouts. Technically challenging but based on observed technology progression I think it will happen before terribly long - perhaps 10 years.
Yes, they could continue to provide security updates for XP for little money, relatively, but why should they?
Who said it had to be for "little money"? Certainly not me. $50 or $100/year times millions of PCs equals quite a lot of money.
Why should MS be forced to do something that's only going to hurt their profitability (in their opinion)?
Whose forcing them? They can do whatever they want. Of course my response may be to leave the Windows ecosystem altogether in which case Microsoft will lose future revenue streams from me. They could have made it easier and more compelling to upgrade but they didn't. If someone hasn't "upgraded" from XP for a decade the interesting question is why not? The answer seems to be that Microsoft hasn't been providing a sufficiently compelling product to give people a reason to switch. They don't have to cater to me specifically but I see little reason to send more money their way without getting some real value in return. I voluntarily upgrade my phone every two years or so because I get more value for my money. I'd do the same with my PC if the ROI was sufficiently large but so far it isn't.
No one owes you a free OS
Never claimed anyone did. Doesn't mean I want to pay for one just because Microsoft doesn't think I'm sending enough money their way lately.
Either pay up for a new MS OS like 7 or 8.1, or if you don't want to spend any money, just download an excellent Linux distro like Mint for free and install it yourself.
Cute how you present those as the only options. I could also go with a linux distro with paid support. I could go over to a Mac OS which has similar support issues but would eliminate any revenue from Microsoft. For some things even Android is becoming an option. Microsoft isn't the airtight monopoly they once were. I virtualized several old XP boxes which I still needed and now I don't even need Windows unless I want to use it. Thanks to virtualization Microsoft cannot force me to upgrade unless I want to do so. So instead of me paying Microsoft a small amount to support their old OS, they get nothing. Last I checked something > nothing.
If you're the only person in your company who knew, you were the only one paying attention.
That's correct. It's also correct in most companies out there outside of IT departments as well as for most home users. This is simply NOT the sort of thing anyone but us geeks is going to pay even the slighted bit of attention to.
But, just like any other equipment that a company buys, things don't last forever, and are depreciated in value over time.
Don't confuse deprecation with anything that has to do with actual value. I'm a certified accountant and I'm telling you that depreciation is rarely meaningful regarding the true value of an asset. You do not throw assets out merely because they are fully depreciated. I have a 25 year old press sitting not 40 feet from me that we make a ton of money off of and that I could sell for many thousands of dollars. It's fully depreciated and has been for years but works fine and if we were to sell it we would realize a capital gain on the sale plus it would cost us a lot of money in lost capability. (and its new owner would have to depreciate it all over again)
If your in the U.S., that's over five years, value of your equipment is now considered to be $0.
Taxable value of an asset has almost NOTHING to do with the productive value of that asset or it's market value if you sell the asset.
Equipment, including software, shouldn't be expected to last indefinitely.
Of course it doesn't but that doesn't mean you throw it out when it is still working. You only replace an asset if it provides a significant return on investment. I defy you to give me a positive ROI on my company replacing our Windows XP computers with Windows 7/8 computers. We would spend thousands of dollars and a lot of time to merely get the exact capabilities we have right at this very moment.
You CLEARLY do not understand how time consuming and costly it is for a company to provide even basic patches for a piece of software.
Really? I'm an accountant and an engineer. I've done a fair bit of programming professionally and I'm pretty sure I've got a better handle on the actual costs involved than most of the people reading this.
. Having repeated interuptions for support calls, entire sets of days that have to be blocked off to patch some bullshit, and a sales department breathing down my neck because the longer this goes on the worse it looks on the company.
None of which is relevant here. Microsoft does not provide support calls unless you are a REALLY big customer and they would be paying for the priviledge. They have people whose entire job is to "patch some bullshit". There is no sales department breathing down anyone's neck regarding XP. The only thing they have to do is fund some staff to patch bugs and keep the infrastructure going. They can even charge for the cost of it.
It IS an enourmous financial burden, especially when they have to invest in researching the security vulnerabilities because if one is discovered and exploited before they patch it hits them in the court of public opinion (and their sales directly)
As I said earlier, I'm an accountant so bear that in mind before you go claiming that it is some enormous financial burden. Fact is that you can look at ANY software company (including Microsoft) and the cost of engineering which includes all of this bug squashing accounts for somewhere between 10%-15% of their costs. You don't have to take my word for it. Go look at their financial statements. The VAST majority of cost for Microsoft is in Sales, Marketing and Administration. Their engineering and "support" costs are significant but given that their NET profit margin is somewhere around 25%, supporting XP isn't exactly killing them financially.
No, Microsoft decided to not give people a path to continue using XP in the hopes that they would be forced to "upgrade". It's a money grab. Nothing more.
1. coding is "fun" and it's something kids/adults would just love spending time doing "if we just exposed them to it"
It can be fun. It can also be soul-breakingly boring. Describes most jobs I know. I'm both an engineer and an accountant. There are aspects of both jobs that are super cool and fun and there are others that I'd rather poke myself in the eye with a fork than do more of it. What makes a job interesting is A) the problem you are working on to solve and B) the people you are doing it with. You need an interesting and relevant problem and you need to work on it with competent people you enjoy working with. What works well for me might bore the crap out of you and that's ok.
2, that kids/adults want to spend their lives in semi-constant frustration of having to get these damn computers working and to learn and relearn skills every 4 years?
Computers are never going to become a smaller part of our lives. One can spend one's life in frustration or get on board and learn about them and they become significantly less frustrating. Not to mention lucrative. I spent a lot of my life learning to use computers well and I am both more productive and less frustrated than a lot of my colleagues as a result. I'm not a programmer but most of the jobs I've gotten have been thanks to my computer skills. Basic principles don't change much so learn those and then you are simply filling in some details here and there.
"dad...you seem really smart...why in the world did you decide to be a programmer and sit behind a computer 10 hours a day instead of doing something cool?"
No disrespect to your daughter but there are a lot of very interesting and fun things that don't seem "cool" to a twelve year old. There are a lot of things you can do as a programmer that are borderline magic and I have huge respect for people who can do it well. Furthermore there are a lot of jobs that aren't "cool" but are immensely satisfying. If you spend your life pursuing what other people think is cool instead of what you think is cool then you're probably going to lead a very frustrating existence.
No other publicly available product has ever had such a long support duration as Windows XP has had.
Bullshit. There are PLENTY of publicly available products that have had similar and even longer support duration. Some products have lifetime warranties. There is plenty of software that is still supported (for free and for $) and is far older than XP. And let's be clear what we mean by "support" here. Microsoft releases some security patches here and there and has a website with some documentation. There is NO ONE at Microsoft who will take my call to get a technical question answered so we're not talking about huge costs here compared with Microsofts profits. Frankly continuing to support XP would probably constitute a rounding error in their P&L.
Microsoft should be under no further obligation to its customers with respect to Windows XP.
For free? I agree they should have no open ended support obligation. That does not mean however that their customers should be forced to spend money on software that does nothing new that they need.
However, if individual customers are willing to _pay_ a subscription for further support from Microsoft, they should be allowed to do so.
Microsoft has taken that option off the table. So exactly what do you propose as an alternative that doesn't involve paying hundreds to thousands of dollars to buy new computers and software that many of us do not actually need?
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However, you can't simply appeal to authority. The medical community is often wrong.
Yes they are wrong with surprising frequency. That does not however mean that you cannot appeal to authority unless you have evidence that they authority is reasonably likely to be wrong. My wife is a doctor and has quite literally forgotten more about medicine than I will ever know. I would be an absolute fool to not take her opinions on any medical matter very seriously. Doesn't mean I have to turn my brain off or that she cannot be wrong but the vast majority of the time she understands the issues involved FAR better than I will. We trust doctors because by and large they have a very credible track record of actually getting it right more than anyone else. In the absence of other available data a trusted expert with a credible track record is a good source of information to listen to.
The pharmaceutical industry has sold some utter crap to people. It routinely does bad things in the name profit.
They also have produced miracle treatments that save lives and alleviate suffering. LOTS of them. Odds are very good that the big percentage of the people reading this are alive today because of the drugs produced by the pharmaceutical industry. They also are closely regulated to ensure that opportunities for quackery are minimized. Just because there have been some criminals in the industry doesn't make the entire industry guilty by association. Microsoft has sold a lot of crap software in the name of profit but we don't blame the entire software industry for their actions. Doing so for the pharma industry is an equally illogical application of guilt by association.
Of all Ms. McCarthy's flaws inherent distrust of the medical industry is not one of them in my opinion.
It is when there is a HUGE amount of evidence that vaccines are largely safe, effective, have few side effects and save lives. You don't have to trust the medical industry but if you don't trust the mountains of credible data available supporting the use of vaccines and other demonstrably effective drugs then you are an idiot. The data is available if you care to look into it. Miss McCarthy plainly has never bothered and her actions almost certainly have lead to preventable deaths and illnesses from confused parents who avoided vaccines for no good reason. What she has done is functionally equivalent to shouting fire in a crowded movie theater when there is no fire. I think her actions are borderline criminal.
I have no problem with a healthy skepticism of any claim no matter how well accepted. Test any and all hypothesis you can. That's how science is supposed to work. But (falsely) claiming authoritatively that there is a link between vaccines and autism when literally none of the evidence supports that claim is irresponsible in the extreme.
Is it because of her advanced medical degree? Her first hand knowledge of the pharmaceutical industry?
Because if you say ANYTHING, no matter how absurd, on television or any other public forum, someone is going to believe it. Doesn't matter if it is true or not. Doesn't matter if it is clearly a joke. Doesn't matter if you explicitly say that it isn't true. Doesn't matter if it is not supported by the evidence, or just clearly logically wrong to anyone with a functioning brain. Some non-zero percentage of the population will absolutely believe it if it is said out loud.
Many people who have to deal with autism are looking for a scapegoat. They want to believe there is a cause other than random chance roll of the genetic dice and that we know what that cause is even when we do not. They are unwilling to accept that the current answer is "we don't know". They want to believe that someone is to blame for their situation. Combine that with the fact that humans are REALLY good at pattern matching, to the point where we often find patterns where there aren't any. As a result they will grasp onto anything that resembles an explanation. They might blame chemicals or vaccines or "immoral" behavior, or comets, or government conspiracies or lack of prayer or violent video games or a minority group conspiracy or any number of other explanations that clearly don't work when examined against the available facts.
There are several logical fallacies at work here. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, confirmation bias, magical thinking, fallacy of the single cause, and probably some others I'm not thinking of.
Shockingly, this move has not led them to embrace any of the vaccines that have been reformulated by popular demand to reduce or eliminate whatever originally had them worried, nor has it led to any apparent interest in working with the toxicology people to determine what level of 'greenness'/'reduced toxins' is acceptable
That's because their objections to vaccines were never based in logic or evidence. Mostly its a combination of conspiracy theory and scientific illiteracy with a bit of confirmation bias and save-the-children thrown in the mix. The same people that would think vaccines cause autism despite there being huge amounts of evidence showing no link whatsoever are the same sort of people who are gullible enough to think homeopathy and other so-called "alternative medicine" is something other than quackery.
I assume her limited acting engagements got even smaller when film studios realized how badly most people didn't like her because of her anti-vaccine views, putting everyone at risk because she is a moron
Frankly most people aren't even aware of her views on vaccines and frankly the studios could not care less about such things for the most part. She gets hired for acting gigs largely on the strength of her physical appearance. Nobody is going to mistake her acting ability with that of Meryl Streep. As brutal as it is to say, an aging playmate/model has a short shelf life in Hollywood. It's hard for even very talented actresses to get work in their 40s. It's much harder when their ability to get acting gigs was based on their looks in the first place.
Yes, of course there will be low paying jobs as well. But we need high paying jobs to move the median up.
It's not as simple as just moving the median. If you move the median wage up then inflation will tend to erase most of the gains and in the short run will hurt the people below the median as well as those displaced by the actions taken to move the median. Inflation adjusted wages haven't actually moved that much in recent years for a big swath of the population. Inflation is not independent of incomes. Not to say you can't move everyone up in time but it's complicated.
Auto production gravitates to places with lowers costs, but the cheap labor conservatives are the ones pitting the states against each other
Again, you are assigning political intent where there (generally) is none. Capital does not care whether you are liberal or conservative. If you are running a business and you are trying to maximize profits then you have to keep costs low. That includes labor costs. None of this has anything to do with being conservative or liberal inherently.
Just look at the Tennessee story, where Volkswagen management wanted a unionized workforce, but the politicians said it would make them noncompetitive
Doesn't mean they are wrong. There was a LOT of BS arguments made by politicians (and others) in Tennessee but not all of it was BS. Unions demonstrably do tend to raise costs and companies will generally try to avoid unions if they have the option to do so as a result. Unions have a pretty bad PR problem at the moment, significantly of their own making. I have no problem at all with workers bargaining collectively but unions have done a terrible job justifying their existence. They need to find a way to show how they will do a better job AND keep costs under control while doing so.
Also, if you think you can get $20 an hour to work at GM, please put an application in, and let me know how that works out for you.
You absolutely CAN get $20/hour to work at GM if you are skilled labor. I live in Michigan and work in the auto industry and I can introduce you to literally hundreds of line workers who currently make more than $20/hour. New hires often make less but not all of them. Some jobs have a limited supply of talent and companies are forced to pay more as a result, GM included.
It's the TOTAL number of high-paying jobs that's important, and people tend to gravitate to what they like.
You seem to overlook the fact that if there are high paying jobs there must, by definition, be low paying jobs as well. Not everyone can have high paying jobs simultaneously anymore than everyone can have an above average IQ. In the long run economic growth can benefit everyone, rich and poor alike. In the short run however it is something close to a zero sum game. If you make one person wealthier you are making another poorer at least temporarily. If you have a larger pool of high paying jobs, in the short run you necessary are making the pot of money available to lower wages workers smaller.
You might be able to implement policies that benefit most/all people in the long run but there will be some short term pain in the process.
I could never imagine working nine to five on an auto assembly line, but that's what people did 50 years ago at GM, for $20 an hour before the cheap labor conservatives came along and crapped in the punch bowl.
People get paid that much TODAY to work on some lines at GM. $20/hour is roughly $40K/year. Not exactly a huge salary in the US these days. There are plenty of assembly workers that get paid well in excess of $20/hour.
Furthermore it isn't "cheap labor conservatives" that limit pay at the automakers. You could have had to most generous liberal management you could envision in charge of GM and Chrysler and they still would have gone bankrupt. What primarily limits direct labor pay is competition. Labor is a huge percentage of the cost of building vehicles. That means that production will gravitate towards locations with cheaper labor costs. Ford, GM and Chrysler in years past agreed to labor contracts that were simply not economically sustainable in the long run. When new competitors with lower labor costs entered the market, the Big Three were unable to adjust their cost structure to match. (Note, this isn't an anti-labor screed. Management shoulders a huge portion of the blame here) Labor costs had to come down and that ultimately meant some combination of lost jobs and lower pay rates. It was simply economic "physics" at work - a reversion to the mean.
Are they detachable by thieves to be sold for the metal value?
Would be a LOT easier to just steal the whole car.
Since when is fuel transfer costly or complicated?
It is HUGELY expensive to transport millions of gallons of jet fuel out into the middle of the ocean. A Nimitz class carrier can hold around 3 million gallons of jet fuel which sounds like a lot but it's enough to keep the planes flying for a few weeks of active operations. You seriously think 3 million gallons of jet fuel every few weeks is cheap?
Furthermore underway transfers are dangerous to both the ships involved and the personnel. Don't mistake a good safety record for an activity being safe.
Even if carriers did not need fuel, they would still require food resupply, equipment resupply, spare parts resupply, munitions resupply, crew swaps, etc. so carriers and other ships would still need to meet with supply ships every other week even if you take fuel out of the equation.
So your argument is that we should not take fuel out of the resupply equation if possible because we're going to have to resupply other stuff anyway? Peculiar argument you've got there...
Why would you make a resupply schedule any more costly and/or complicated than absolutely necessary?
At sea refueling is trivially easy, all you need is a ship that can carry a lot of fuel, a pump, and a hose.
"Trivially easy"? I think the Navy would disagree strongly with you on that. There are a huge number of non-trivial logistics issues. You have the expense of maintaining a second ship. You have to have that ship transport the fuel to an arbitrary location on the globe. You have to keep the fuel supply safe and ensure that the fuel tender isn't tracked back to the ship it is refueling. You have a ship with a large amount of potentially explosive fuel on board with all the attendant safety hazards that causes. It means your ships are limited in where they can go and how long by their fuel supplies rather than mission parameters.
The fact that they're fairly good at doing it doesn't mean it is something they find easy or useful. Cut of a military's fuel supply and they are effectively helpless. Fuel logistics are a HUGE and expensive problem for the military. It supposedly costs something like $16 to transport $1 worth of fuel. Also bear in mind that a lot of fuel comes from pretty volatile locations that we are likely to engage in hostile action with. There is a reason our military is putting a LOT of money into alternative fuel research. It's a huge cost and a huge tactical/strategic problem for them.
And realistically, when is a carrier or other ship likely to be far from supply lines?
Middle of the Pacific perhaps? Or any other ocean? Or when near hostiles? You don't really want to be refueling anywhere close to the people you are fighting if you can avoid it.
That's too bad, since the 2500 Cummins still had a manual available (the only one left in a full-size truck) the last time I checked.
Out of curiosity, why do you want a manual for a truck? Current automatic transmissions have 8-10 gears (the Ram 1500 has 8) and you certainly wouldn't want to row that many gears. I like manual transmissions too but only in cars like a BMW that are fun to drive. I like my truck fine but I wouldn't describe it as fun to drive.
Nissan is supposedly coming out with a diesel for their Titan pickup (heavy duty I think) in the next year or so. Might be worth investigating. If the Ram 1500 ecodiesel is a success (off to a good start) I'd be surprised if Ford and Chevy didn't follow suit.
Actually what I'd *really* like to see is a diesel-electric hybrid for trucks. Think about it. If you want gobs of torque there is nothing better than electric motors. That's why they use them on locomotives. For a truck it makes perfect sense to treat it like a small scale locomotive if you are hauling stuff. You'd be able to get better fuel economy AND better hauling power. I'm kind of surprised we haven't seen semis with that sort of powertrain yet. Would make a lot of sense I would think.
Diesel 3-series (which has been around for several years now actually)
Unfortunately the recent version is quite a bit less powerful than the 335d from a few years ago which got worse gas mileage but had over 400ft/lbs of torque. I'd happily buy a used 335d if I could find a used one for a decent price. I test drove one 3-4 years ago and it was awesome.
Ram Ecodiesel are pretty high on my list of vehicles to get sooner or later
Probably the truck I'll get to replace my Ridgeline. I can't believe it's taken so long to get that engine in a pickup. I'm more surprised it isn't available in a Jeep Wrangler.
I just hope they're available with a manual transmission...
Highly unlikely I think for the pickup. Very probable for the BMW though.
That's still absolute shit economy relative to its size, given that a VW Golf/Jetta TDI (which, being an American, is about the only Diesel I know to compare to) is only about 5 mpg lower.
There finally are now a few decent diesel options. A Jeep Grand Cherokee diesel with 420 ft/lbs of torque gets 30mpg highway. The 2014 BMW 3 series diesel gets 32city/45hwy MPG. The Ram 1500 ecodiesel gets about 28mpg highway and can tow 9000lbs. (same engine as the Grand Cherokee)
That is not the pain of XP EoL, it is the self inflicted torture by those who refuse to use free and open source software.
Refuse? Find me accounting software that is open source and functionally equivalent to even something as basic as Quickbooks or some 3D CAD software equivalent to Solidworks or photo editing equivalent to Photoshop. (I'll save you some time, they don't exist and GIMP is not a replacement for Photoshop) Open source is great and all but it doesn't solve every problem and there are some very important bits of software that quite simply do not have open source options available. Are you planning to write them?
Believe me, if I'm an accountant and if there was an open source version of something like Quickbooks out there that worked well, I'd be all over that like stink on a skunk. Unfortunately no such thing exists. Exactly how do you propose a business do their accounting without using proprietary software? Enlighten us.
I'd guess there were more person hours spent on classical music then vs. today.
Maybe per capita but not likely on an absolute basis. Populations now are just a LOT larger.
You're mistaken, security is that feature.
Security is a process not a feature. And the security in XP is entirely adequate for my rather modest needs. Win 7 is unquestionably better but not enough that I care because the threat profile I face isn't going to be meaningfully improved by Windows 7. Security is like insurance. Nice to have but you can easily pay for more of it than you actually need.
Do you actually realize how fucking complicated Windows is under the hood? Millions of lines of code written in low level languages.
As a matter of fact I do realize that. I have a VERY clear understanding of what it requires. I also know that Microsoft already has the infrastructure in place to maintain it and I know that its affect on Microsoft's profitability is quite modest judging by their financial statements which I have read in some detail. If they cease support then they will never put humpty-dumpty back together again.
There are other reasons beyond "money grab" at play, but you clearly don't care to look at that anyway, so no use wasting my time there.
I disagree. Yes there are technical challenges but money is the bottom line here. Not even a question about that. Microsoft made a strategic decision which they believe will profit the company best in the long run. There is even a good chance they are right. However as a user of their products I am under no obligation to be supportive of Microsoft's decision as it adversely affects me. I run a company that uses mostly XP workstations and they work fine for our admittedly modest needs. I don't relish the prospect of spending thousands of dollars to replace machines that weren't broken in the first place.
Realistically the current 30 minutes for 180 miles range or 50 minutes for a full 300 mile range charge that Tesla offers is more than adequate for most people.
I think it is close but they probably need to cut the 30 minute time in half before people will be ok with it. 30 minutes is a pretty long time to stand around your car waiting for it to charge. It's fine if you are stopping for a long break but I don't really need to stop for a half hour or more every 3 hours of driving. My current car can go from Detroit to Cleveland and about halfway back on a single tank and if I need to stop it is a 5-10 minute deal. A Telsa could usually make the trip one way (barely) but if I needed to stop for fuel I'd add a half hour minimum to the trip. Not bad but not quite competitive yet either.
50 minutes for a full 300 mile range charge that Tesla offers
How close you'll get to the maximum claimed range depends on how you are driving and the weather. With sloppy cold weather and fast driving you might only see 200 miles of range. I spoke with a Tesla owner and he indicated that driving like crazy in cold sloppy weather with everything running (heater etc) you might see a range of around 180 miles on their biggest battery pack (which he had).
Electric vehicles will have match that capability at some point or they are going to be forever stuck in the niche of toys and glorified shopping carts.
They probably don't need to match the speed of refueling with gasoline but they need to get close. I figure something in the 10-20 minute range for around 200 miles of range is probably about where it will get competitive.
There is the option of having a towable generator for longer trips to extend range for long trips. Think of it as hybrid on demand. Not the most elegant of solutions but might be a useful stopgap measure while electric vehicle charging tech develops.
Very fast charge (on the order of 1-2 mins for current battery sizes) would make "gas stations" viable for electric cars.
I think the magic tipping point number is probably somewhere around 10-15 minutes. Maybe 20 at the outside. I doesn't have to be shorter than gasoline pumps but it needs to be relatively close in duration to get enough juice to go something like 200 miles or thereabouts. Technically challenging but based on observed technology progression I think it will happen before terribly long - perhaps 10 years.
Yes, they could continue to provide security updates for XP for little money, relatively, but why should they?
Who said it had to be for "little money"? Certainly not me. $50 or $100/year times millions of PCs equals quite a lot of money.
Why should MS be forced to do something that's only going to hurt their profitability (in their opinion)?
Whose forcing them? They can do whatever they want. Of course my response may be to leave the Windows ecosystem altogether in which case Microsoft will lose future revenue streams from me. They could have made it easier and more compelling to upgrade but they didn't. If someone hasn't "upgraded" from XP for a decade the interesting question is why not? The answer seems to be that Microsoft hasn't been providing a sufficiently compelling product to give people a reason to switch. They don't have to cater to me specifically but I see little reason to send more money their way without getting some real value in return. I voluntarily upgrade my phone every two years or so because I get more value for my money. I'd do the same with my PC if the ROI was sufficiently large but so far it isn't.
No one owes you a free OS
Never claimed anyone did. Doesn't mean I want to pay for one just because Microsoft doesn't think I'm sending enough money their way lately.
Either pay up for a new MS OS like 7 or 8.1, or if you don't want to spend any money, just download an excellent Linux distro like Mint for free and install it yourself.
Cute how you present those as the only options. I could also go with a linux distro with paid support. I could go over to a Mac OS which has similar support issues but would eliminate any revenue from Microsoft. For some things even Android is becoming an option. Microsoft isn't the airtight monopoly they once were. I virtualized several old XP boxes which I still needed and now I don't even need Windows unless I want to use it. Thanks to virtualization Microsoft cannot force me to upgrade unless I want to do so. So instead of me paying Microsoft a small amount to support their old OS, they get nothing. Last I checked something > nothing.
If you're the only person in your company who knew, you were the only one paying attention.
That's correct. It's also correct in most companies out there outside of IT departments as well as for most home users. This is simply NOT the sort of thing anyone but us geeks is going to pay even the slighted bit of attention to.
But, just like any other equipment that a company buys, things don't last forever, and are depreciated in value over time.
Don't confuse deprecation with anything that has to do with actual value. I'm a certified accountant and I'm telling you that depreciation is rarely meaningful regarding the true value of an asset. You do not throw assets out merely because they are fully depreciated. I have a 25 year old press sitting not 40 feet from me that we make a ton of money off of and that I could sell for many thousands of dollars. It's fully depreciated and has been for years but works fine and if we were to sell it we would realize a capital gain on the sale plus it would cost us a lot of money in lost capability. (and its new owner would have to depreciate it all over again)
If your in the U.S., that's over five years, value of your equipment is now considered to be $0.
Taxable value of an asset has almost NOTHING to do with the productive value of that asset or it's market value if you sell the asset.
Equipment, including software, shouldn't be expected to last indefinitely.
Of course it doesn't but that doesn't mean you throw it out when it is still working. You only replace an asset if it provides a significant return on investment. I defy you to give me a positive ROI on my company replacing our Windows XP computers with Windows 7/8 computers. We would spend thousands of dollars and a lot of time to merely get the exact capabilities we have right at this very moment.
You CLEARLY do not understand how time consuming and costly it is for a company to provide even basic patches for a piece of software.
Really? I'm an accountant and an engineer. I've done a fair bit of programming professionally and I'm pretty sure I've got a better handle on the actual costs involved than most of the people reading this.
. Having repeated interuptions for support calls, entire sets of days that have to be blocked off to patch some bullshit, and a sales department breathing down my neck because the longer this goes on the worse it looks on the company.
None of which is relevant here. Microsoft does not provide support calls unless you are a REALLY big customer and they would be paying for the priviledge. They have people whose entire job is to "patch some bullshit". There is no sales department breathing down anyone's neck regarding XP. The only thing they have to do is fund some staff to patch bugs and keep the infrastructure going. They can even charge for the cost of it.
It IS an enourmous financial burden, especially when they have to invest in researching the security vulnerabilities because if one is discovered and exploited before they patch it hits them in the court of public opinion (and their sales directly)
As I said earlier, I'm an accountant so bear that in mind before you go claiming that it is some enormous financial burden. Fact is that you can look at ANY software company (including Microsoft) and the cost of engineering which includes all of this bug squashing accounts for somewhere between 10%-15% of their costs. You don't have to take my word for it. Go look at their financial statements. The VAST majority of cost for Microsoft is in Sales, Marketing and Administration. Their engineering and "support" costs are significant but given that their NET profit margin is somewhere around 25%, supporting XP isn't exactly killing them financially.
No, Microsoft decided to not give people a path to continue using XP in the hopes that they would be forced to "upgrade". It's a money grab. Nothing more.
1. coding is "fun" and it's something kids/adults would just love spending time doing "if we just exposed them to it"
It can be fun. It can also be soul-breakingly boring. Describes most jobs I know. I'm both an engineer and an accountant. There are aspects of both jobs that are super cool and fun and there are others that I'd rather poke myself in the eye with a fork than do more of it. What makes a job interesting is A) the problem you are working on to solve and B) the people you are doing it with. You need an interesting and relevant problem and you need to work on it with competent people you enjoy working with. What works well for me might bore the crap out of you and that's ok.
2, that kids/adults want to spend their lives in semi-constant frustration of having to get these damn computers working and to learn and relearn skills every 4 years?
Computers are never going to become a smaller part of our lives. One can spend one's life in frustration or get on board and learn about them and they become significantly less frustrating. Not to mention lucrative. I spent a lot of my life learning to use computers well and I am both more productive and less frustrated than a lot of my colleagues as a result. I'm not a programmer but most of the jobs I've gotten have been thanks to my computer skills. Basic principles don't change much so learn those and then you are simply filling in some details here and there.
"dad...you seem really smart...why in the world did you decide to be a programmer and sit behind a computer 10 hours a day instead of doing something cool?"
No disrespect to your daughter but there are a lot of very interesting and fun things that don't seem "cool" to a twelve year old. There are a lot of things you can do as a programmer that are borderline magic and I have huge respect for people who can do it well. Furthermore there are a lot of jobs that aren't "cool" but are immensely satisfying. If you spend your life pursuing what other people think is cool instead of what you think is cool then you're probably going to lead a very frustrating existence.
No other publicly available product has ever had such a long support duration as Windows XP has had.
Bullshit. There are PLENTY of publicly available products that have had similar and even longer support duration. Some products have lifetime warranties. There is plenty of software that is still supported (for free and for $) and is far older than XP. And let's be clear what we mean by "support" here. Microsoft releases some security patches here and there and has a website with some documentation. There is NO ONE at Microsoft who will take my call to get a technical question answered so we're not talking about huge costs here compared with Microsofts profits. Frankly continuing to support XP would probably constitute a rounding error in their P&L.
Microsoft should be under no further obligation to its customers with respect to Windows XP.
For free? I agree they should have no open ended support obligation. That does not mean however that their customers should be forced to spend money on software that does nothing new that they need.
However, if individual customers are willing to _pay_ a subscription for further support from Microsoft, they should be allowed to do so.
Microsoft has taken that option off the table. So exactly what do you propose as an alternative that doesn't involve paying hundreds to thousands of dollars to buy new computers and software that many of us do not actually need?